Make Tribeca Whole

Make Tribeca Whole Lynn Ellsworth, Tribeca Trust This essay explores how historic districts - Tribeca’s in particular - create a unique sense of place, the history that preceded them, the fragility of the commons they create, and why they ought to be expanded. Historic Districts Create a Livable, Distinctive Neighborhood What creates the unique sense of place that we find within Tribeca’s built environment? How did Tribeca end up so desirable? The answer lies in the historic districts. Without them, Tribeca’s character would have vanished in the same way historic Yorkville on the Upper East Side vanished from the Upper East Side underneath a welter of stark, high-density high-rises and public-private plazas.1 Historic district designation also made Tribeca into an international urban success story, one that illustrates how adaptive re-use of a whole neighborhood is smart development.2 Of course, it wasn’t only historic district designation that made Tribeca successful. Other assets played synergistic roles. For example, it helps that Tribeca is walking distance to two industries: government and finance. Second, Tribeca has always had great subway access. Third, by 1978, loft dwellers and residents of Independence Plaza had built two small but visually distinctive public gems that reflected the architectural language of the as-yet-undesignated historic district: an elementary school and a children’s park. Combine the school and park with the public good represented by historic district designation and you get something more: a “world class” residential neighborhood and a recipe for how to create one. That quality has also resulted in enormous demand for access to Tribeca. The very intensity of this demand has bred problems that threaten the long-term character of Tribeca’s built environment. The problems can be lain at the door of the policy decision to “under-designate” the historic districts and leave out about a third of Tribeca. Towers and overly bulked piles now rise on the sites that were excluded even though these same new buildings erode the sense of place that put Tribeca on the map. Under-designation was clearly a mistake. How did it happen? And above all, what can we do to fix it? Is it too late? This essay speaks to these questions. Tribeca and the “Golden Age of American Architecture” 1 The editor of Metropolis magazine has even published a video lamenting the loss of Yorkville called “My Banal Neighborhood”. 2 As it did for Soho as well. 1 In 1945, before there was Tribeca, Battery Park City and the World Trade Center site, the area was thought of as the Lower West Side. It had several linked zones within it. There was Washington Market, Radio Row, the waterfront, Little Syria and clustering of occupations that created districts like the textile, crockery, printing, produce, egg and butter districts. The entire architectural ensemble looked like what the historic parts of Tribeca look like today. A lot of it was brick. There was cast iron and limestone. It was medium- rise, punctuated by the occasional “early” masonry-clad skyscrapers of 10-15 stories. And it was vast, stretching all the way from Liberty Street to the West Village, reaching deep into what is now Soho and Chinatown. It was not just a food market and warehouses. It had a little bit of everything: white collar offices, garages, blacksmiths, residences, tenements, printers, small banks, small retail, publishing, and a huge variety of small-scale manufacturing. There were a lot of “poor” people living in these commercial areas too, a fact not mentioned much in the usual sources. It was diverse and thriving, a world built before the zoning code tried to separate occupations and people. If you add in the Seaport and the Battery/Wall Street zone, the entire area represented the historic core of the most successful 20th century city on the continent. Noted architect and historian Robert Stern identifies the period when Tribeca (and most of NYC) was built – from the end of the Civil War to the onset of WWII – as the “Golden Age of American Architecture.” Walking through Tribeca today you can still see that period: original row houses, the warehouses and lofts that replaced the row houses, and the larger factories and office buildings that came even later. Each new wave – built in a common architectural language - added diversity to the streetscape. The result was the “wonder city” whose bustling diversity and beauty awed everyone, even before the great skyscrapers came up. The lower west side was a huge center of small businesses at the confluence of the financial, shipping, government, printing, and textile district. It was dominated by middle and small guys renting in small offices, many of them linked to the agricultural world through Washington Market supply chains. The area that would become Tribeca had also survived a number of destructive upheavals. St. John’s Park became the Hudson Rail terminus; the terminus then became the cloverleaf to the Holland Tunnel. Elevated trains went up on the avenues and then came down in the 1920’s. The subway arrived in 1904. Throughout all these changes, a great part of the built environment endured: tenacious, gritty, medium-density (enough to support subways) and beautiful. It was successful without a doubt as a series of linked, walkable city neighborhoods. However, it had a problem. The wealthy had all left in the 1880s when Vanderbilt’s railroad terminus replaced St. John’s Park. The building of the elevated trains had chased out any stragglers among them. This meant that after the war the area had no powerful resident protectors just when a new period of destruction would begin. 2 The Post War Conundrum by the Hudson At the end of World War II, although the west side piers were still booming, the infrastructure of the car and truck was on the rise. Putting those new roadways and tunnels had done quite a bit of damage to the city. For example, the residents of the lower part of Little Syria on Washington Street got booted out by eminent domain in 1945 to construct the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. The residents of little Syria were Christian Arabs, but seen as irrelevant to bigger plans or a Robert Moses- determined “greater good”. Not so irrelevant were the longshoremen and the Genovese crime family. Together, they had tight control of the west side wharves and they contended with the Port Authority who claimed greater lordship there. They were not so easily gotten rid of. Historians differ on what happened next. Some say it was containerization. Shipping containers require very few workers, but lots of empty spaces as a staging ground for the equipment, or so the argument goes. The Longshoremen’s Union knew containers were a threat to their existence. They tried to resist. Some historians imply that it seemed easier for the Port Authority to move the shipping out of the West Side altogether than to contend with the West Side’s tough longshoremen and unpalatable mob families. Either way, the Port Authority built a new “modern” container port over in New Jersey in the 1950’s. From there it sent its first container shipment out in 1956. The immediate effect was to reduce demand for unloading things at the West Side piers. It made the physical infrastructure appear as un-modern as the union and the mob who dwelt there. What should be done with piers that the Port Authority (and technology?) had rendered redundant? No civic authority responded with strength or leadership to the shipping decline of shipping with ideas about adaptive re-use of the docks and warehouses near the river. Stranger still, nobody in power thought about capitalizing on the amazing vitality of the nearby produce market that retailed food around the country to chefs and housewives alike. Despite it’s obvious success, Washington Market was also seen as archaic as well. Some of this lack of imagination can be explained by the era. It was still the 1950’s. Cars and trucks were taking over the cities, crippling the railroads. Workers were moving to Levittown. It seemed that all a city really needed to improve itself was wide straight avenues and better highways to let the cars in. Top-down mega-planning was also in vogue among economists and planners alike, and a new, “modern” and gigantic American architectural corporatism was on the ascent. West Village resident Jane Jacobs had not yet published her influential book, The Death and Life of American 3 Cities. Adaptive reuse of old buildings, one of her key arguments, was not yet an idea in the mainstream. Situating the Problem of the Lower West Side It was in this cultural and technological moment that Lower Manhattan became subject to a barrage of policy debates and an ensuing wave of real estate speculation. The debates were complicated by the fact – if not prompted by it -- that the big property developers down here had made a mess of the financial district and lower Broadway by overbuilding it in the 1920’s. They had torn down an amazing number of architecturally great (and very large) buildings to put up even bigger buildings. It had been a typical speculative frenzy that was called to a halt only by the Great Depression and one that brought forth the Zoning Code. Moreover, in their frenzy, the developers had built too high for the narrow streets of Dutch New York. The area ended up being seen as too congested, too, dark, and a little creepy. When good times returned after the war, Midtown with its superblocks and straight avenues become the prime location for corporations.

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